No, not a real new bike. New spin bikes at the gym. Despite having a super fancy trainer at home and a nice, comfortable road bike in that trainer in a dedicated space in my basement, I’m making myself visit the gym some nights. If I go to the gym I can pretend that I’ve got some sort of social interaction with people outside of the office, even if everyone there is plugged into their headphones — we’re there together listening to our headphones together.

The new bikes are somewhat Tron-esque, with a great big display of all sorts of info. Apparently you plug in your own media device and watch your own movies, or watch the spinning movies provided by the bike, or follow their preprogrammed workouts. Unfortunately you can’t program your own workout beyond length of time.

Because I don’t currently have an exercise watch, I’ve been using the Tabata Pro app on my iphone to help me keep track of repetitve interval type things. It runs in the background and tells you audibly when to go hard and when to rest. Handy, you don’t have to do math or keep track of when you started an interval section, or how many you have left to do. It’s somewhat limited, you can’t get too creative with your patterns, but it’s been working pretty well for me.

While I actually like the cadence meter built into these new bikes, the ‘helpful tips’ can be a big annoying.

Thanks, bike. Notice I had elapsed an entire 00:49 on the bike at that point, of course I’m doing great. Certainly I’ll keep it up. 59:11 yet to go.